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Schama uses the novelist’s tools to tell two stories which demonstrate the difficulty of arriving at a definitive version of any historical event. The first is the death of General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, and the subsequent mythology built up around him by, among others, Benjamin West, who painted the very famous The Death of General Wolfe (1770) and the American historian Francis Parkman, who wrote about Wolfe. Schama shows us many different versions of Wolfe: was he hero or invalid? Whose interpretation is correct? Schama includes imagined scenes in his story, which are based on his careful research.
The second story is of the murder in Boston of Francis Parkman’s brother George by a Harvard professor named John Webster. Again, the focus is on the many different versions of the murder itself presented at Webster’s murder trial and the variety of impressions of Webster and Parkman among the citizens of Boston.
Schama is a very good writer, and this is an interesting examination of the historical process, of the fictionalizing tendency in all story-telling, whether fact-based or not. Nevertheless, I’m not sure, after reading it, why he wrote it. Two interesting stories, connected by the Parkman family, but nothing terribly urgent or profound in the material communicated. Still, worth reading.
